One of the present challenges confronting American society is the need for more equitable access to education and career opportunities. Every year, many first-year college students need more academic skills. Community colleges' open admission processes and low tuition rates offer viable choices for people seeking higher education (Dougherty &…

This dissertation examined how adult learners who took developmental mathematics in a community college and passed the courses, viewed their self-efficacy and the roles they felt self-efficacy had on their successful completion of mathematics. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 adult learners in two U.S. community colleges.…

The purpose of this phenomenological case study was to explore the perceived effectiveness of a restructured developmental education program at one campus of a large, multi-campus community college in North Texas. The restructuring process was guided by the mandates of Texas House Bill 2223 passed in 2017. One of the components of the bill allowed…

Community colleges provide a key point of access to higher education across the United States. These colleges are especially important for underprepared students, especially in mathematics. This is especially true of rural students, who often have lacked the access to educational resources. Research on growth mindset theory has provided promising…

The problem addressed in this study was that teachers have been challenged to implement effective strategies in recent years at a local community college in the southern region of the United States with a 47 to 49% student failure rate in developmental English. The purpose was to investigate the challenges encountered by developmental English…

Throughout the 21st century, the discipline of developmental education has come under fire for low success rates and has created a great deal of controversy. This has especially been the case for developmental math. Over the years, there have been many initiatives to improve student success and completion in developmental math. Some have succeeded…

This study examined the effect on pass rates from one community college after removing developmental English prerequisites on non-English credit-bearing courses in Fall 2020. This mixed methods quasi-experimental research evaluated whether a developmental English prerequisite is necessary for completion of credit-bearing courses and identified…

Beginning in 2019, California community colleges were required to use multiple measures to determine students' placement into initial math courses. Community colleges also created structured BSTEM and liberal arts (SLAM) math pathways beginning in 2017. This contemporaneous implementation could reproduce racialized stratification in math…

Community colleges began as a way to offer higher education to those that wanted it but could not leave home to further their degree. As they evolved, they began allowing students to be admitted with very little admission requirements. The lack of admission requirements led to students being admitted into community colleges that were not prepared…

This counterstorytelling study involved examining how Practitioners of Color (POC) enact "carino" and embed restorative literacies or cultural and community practices in community college integrated reading and writing (IRW) classrooms to create a safe counterspace for Students of Color (SOC). The significance of this research is to…

A midwestern community college utilized a corequisite model to accelerate students' developmental education that allows adult learners to take developmental writing and English composition simultaneously. First-year composition instructors had no formal training at the college on andragogical methods and teaching strategies to foster successful…

The author examines the process for applying for National Association for Development Education (NADE) accreditation. The multi-year process began when the English faculty of the community college she works at reviewed data from the National Community College Benchmark Project. The data showed low success rates and poor persistence from…

Background/Context: Accelerated instructional strategies for developmental education have been promoted as a way to help underprepared students to progress more quickly through college-level coursework. Yet, what remains unknown is whether certain accelerated strategies are more effective than others and whether this initial acceleration may lead…

The completion of developmental community college (DCC) courses is a crucial step in community college education to reach the national goal of increasing college success. DCC students are a unique population who require specific strategies such as vocabulary retention (VR) to achieve academic success. Prior research on vocabulary has been limited…

We estimate the cost effectiveness of corequisite English developmental education at community colleges compared with a traditional prerequisite pathway. Our context is a previously published randomized controlled trial that estimated the effects of three different approaches to English corequisites implemented in five Texas community colleges.…